waaah, i just read the headline and thought you read my mind last night!...

no way, not with pixelshader2.0. There are only 64 Operations and we have no loops.
Maybe someday when people will have more powerful graphics cards and Geiss launches a new MD version for higher pixelshader levels...

BUT...
some basic ferns are possible: check out this one! (it's about eight hours old...)

nope. not with the algorithms i know.
It twisted my mind for so long now, if there's a dirty way with a wicked uv-transformation... but all i got was some serious headaches.
Rovastars Fractopia points in this direction, but i didn't play much with it, and if i'm right there will never be a deep dive-in like mad.

argh - i made these presets on my radeon9600, where texture wrap only works with a workaround - replace all the sampler_main with sampler_fc_main to avoid mirroring to death... thx for that hint, will fix it.

in 2 weeks i will get a new PC with a HD3870. Is it sick to be thrilled for a new PC for... Milkdrop?

here's the most current of its kind.
can you please tell me whether it runs as it should.

hehe these 4 multiplications are too much for my old video card... (no PS3.0 support)
basically it's a rebuild of textured custom shapes but with a twist:
custom shapes have no option to change the aspect ratio and i also did some tricks - green and blue channels are feeded by the red one, where the main fern lies in.

the rest is simple: greyscale the rgb input and mapping a palette with a polynome on the grey value.

pretty sure ps.2 has for loops, but i know 3 does got the m set right here... still working on it, I'll put it out here soon, ps3 only unfortunately as it was like 147 instructions at 10 iterations, I'm at 30i now only getting 20fps(gs7300 i think)

i'm still waiting for my new cpu and video card to check it out (case, mobo and the rest is already here)
Meanwhile there's a lot of fun with Julia sets too. - and they run smooth even on my Radeon9600/9700

btw: i had to correct the PS version for your presets with the notepad and i had to include the texture wrap workaround - but only in the 'sweet mix' i could figure out a fractal. maybe you can post a screenshot of one of the other presets.